Building a Legacy

He’d pass the new University’s campus every weekend driving rural roads to the cottage his family was building in Oxford in 1960.

He blazed the trail for his family, too, as he was the first to attend Oakland. Dr. Templeton would earn three degrees: a bachelor’s in engineering in 1976, master’s in electrical engineering in 1979 and a doctorate in systems engineering in 1986.

His brother, David Templeton, SBA ’77, and sister-in-law, Lynn, SON ’77, and their son, Michael, SECS ’10, followed.

The legacy continues.

Dr. Templeton handed his daughter Melanie, CAS ’15, her OU diploma – number seven in the Templeton family – at Commencement ceremonies in May. Dr. Templeton, an Oakland University Alumni Association (OUAA) board member, also spoke at the Commencement.

“I knew it was a great school going into it because a lot of my family went there,” Melanie said. “I also had good experiences there myself. My older cousin, Michael, swam on the swim team, so I went to a lot of his meets. I was on my high school dance team and we had camp there. Oakland is the perfect medium-size school.”

Her father credits OU as the place he figured out what he wanted to be when he grew up. He had attended a conference there on lasers in 1968 after winning a science fair in eighth grade.

“I thought I wanted to be a physicist, but at the conference all of the people working with lasers were electrical engineers, so I knew what I had to do,” he said.

He retired in 2014 after 33 years with the U.S. Army Tank-Automotive Command in Warren and now works as a consultant on ground platform survivability. Dr. Templeton visits OU several times a week to swim, socialize and assist the School of Engineering and Computer Science or the OUAA.